Liberal Party of Canada

Party Leader: Mark Carney
Click here for a list of Liberal’s MPs and Candidates

In their 2025 platform, the Liberal Party of Canada has pledged to:
*This is taken from the 2025 Liberal Party of Canada Canada election platform

Reinforcing CBC/Radio-Canada, Protecting Canadian Voices 

• Enshrine and protect CBC/Radio Canada by introducing legislation to establish statutory funding. Funding for our national public broadcaster should not be subject to the whims of government; our national institutions deserve to be protected by Parliament and changed only with the consent of the House of Commons and the people it represents. 

• Strengthen CBC/Radio Canada’s mandate by: 

  • Developing a governance plan with CBC/Radio Canada to improve accountability, empower leadership, streamline processes and tap into the spirit of innovation. This will also improve citizen engagement and understanding of our country, from the West Coast to the East Coast and to the far reaches of the Canadian North. It is only by engaging all parts of our country that we can tell its stories. 

  • Equipping them to further promote and support Canadian culture including Quebec’s unique culture, which is at the heart of our national identity. 

  • Strengthening local news, so that all Canadians have access to timely, relevant and reliable news. 

  • Adding to their mandate the clear and consistent transmission of life-saving information during emergencies. 

  • Including a commitment of including Indigenous perspectives. 

  • Fully equipping them to combat disinformation so that Canadians have a news source they know and trust. 

  • Bolstering innovation and investing in new digital tools so that they can deliver the news when and how Canadians want it. 

• Provide an initial $150 million boost in annual funding while directing CBC/Radio Canada to develop a strategic plan consistent with this new mandate. We will work towards bringing CBC/Radio Canada’s long-term funding levels in line with the average funding of other national public broadcasters over time. 

• Support Canadian artists and creators by increasing funding to agencies such as the Canada Council for the Arts, Telefilm, the Canada Media Fund, and the National Film Board, recognizing the economic importance of Canada’s creative industries and creators. The more of our perspectives that are brought to life, the better we understand Canada, and the more we can show the world what makes Canada strong. 

Discovering and Celebrating Canada 

• Introduce a Canada Strong Pass for three months this summer. The Canada Strong Pass will provide children and youth under the age of 18 with free access to Canada’s incredible national galleries and museums, and free seats on VIA Rail when they travel with their parents. We will work with willing provinces and territories to establish similar pricing structures in our beautiful provincial museums and galleries. This pass will be available from June to August 2025. We will also introduce heavily discounted access and fares for young Canadians aged 18-24. 

• Make access to National Parks and Historic Sites free this summer for everyone. We will also reduce prices for camping sites in national parks for all Canadians from June to August. Now is the time to rediscover Canada in all its beauty 

To read more on the 2025 Liberal Party of Canada’s platform, click here.

Conservative Party of Canada

Party Leader: Pierre Poilievre
Click here for a list of Conservative Party of Canada MPs and Candidates

In their 2025 platform, the Conservative Party of Canada has pledged to:
*This is taken from the 2025 Conservative Party of Canada Canada election platform

Protect Our Shared Canadian Identity - For A Change

We will support media freedom by: 

• Introducing a Freedom of Speech Act to repeal Liberal censorship laws and restore Canadian news on Meta and other platforms. 

• Boosting the Local Journalism Initiative by $25 million for local news. 

• Ensuring all domestic government advertising dollars are spent on Canadian platforms only. 

• Providing $25 million in support for Indigenous language media. 

• Supporting remote-area internet connectivity so every Canadian has reliable access to news. 

• We will save by defunding the CBC and reforming Crown corporations while maintaining Radio-Canada services. English-language CBC should be a Canadian-owned, self-sufficient media organization that is a not-for-profit and supported by listeners, donations, sponsorships, ad revenue, and licensing revenue. 

We will also celebrate Canada’s story by: 

• Restoring in-person citizenship ceremonies and updating the citizenship oath to add the following words: “I pledge gratitude to those who worked, sacrificed, and gave their lives to defend the freedom I now enjoy and to build the country of Canada I now call home. Like them, I pledge to fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen.” 

• Doubling the number of language exchange spots so that every year, 10,000 youth who would not otherwise be able to afford it will have the opportunity to bridge the two solitudes and strengthen our two official languages. 

• Erecting national monuments to honour Canadian Armed Forces veterans who served in the Second World War and those who served in Afghanistan. 

• Funding the first made-in-Canada documentaries about Canadians’ contributions to winning the World Wars so future Canadians do not forget the courage and sacrifice of those generations and their stories live on. 

• Restoring Canadian monuments and heroes like Terry Fox and Vimy Ridge, as well as our Indigenous Peoples, to our Canadian passport. 

To read more on the 2025 Conservative Party of Canada’s platform, click here.

Canada NDP

Party Leader: Jagmeet Singh
Click here for a list of Canada NDP MPs and Candidates

The Canada NDP has released their 2025 platform but have yet to make any direct commitments to the arts and culture sector.

To read more on the 2025 Canada NDP’s platform, click here.

Green Party of Canada

Party Leader: Elizabeth May and Jonathan Pedneault
Click here for a list of Green Party of Canada’s MPs and Candidates

In their 2025 platform, the Green Party of Canada has pledged to:
*This is taken from the 2025 Green Party of Canada Canada election platform

Funding for Arts and Cultural Institutions

• Enhance funding for Canada’s arts and cultural sectors, including significant increases for the Canada Council for the Arts, Telefilm Canada, orchestras, and performing arts organizations nationwide.

• Establish stable, multi-year base funding for community arts programs across Canada, ensuring long-term sustainability and access to cultural activities at the community level.

• Provide targeted funding to help museums and cultural institutions fully recover from pandemic impacts, improve digital accessibility, and broaden public engagement.

• Establish permanent federal funding dedicated to festivals, events, and celebrations that showcase Canadian culture, heritage, and diversity.

• Provide targeted additional funding specifically to the Canada Council for the Arts, National Film Board, and Telefilm Canada to support creative projects that focus explicitly on climate action, sustainability, and raising public awareness about the climate crisis.

• Ensure stable federal funding for minority-language post-secondary institutions, supporting cultural preservation and linguistic diversity across Canada.

Support for Artists and Creative Workers

• Provide federal incentives to provinces and territories to restore, expand, and enhance arts education programs, especially within rural and remote schools, promoting equal educational opportunities in arts and culture nationwide.

• Implement income averaging for artists and cultural workers to stabilize their financial circumstances, accommodating the income fluctuations typical within the creative sector.

• Establish dedicated federal funding to support touring artists and cultural events, particularly in rural and underserved communities, ensuring equitable access to arts and cultural experiences across Canada.

• Fund initiatives that support communities in reinterpreting historical monuments, plaques, and heritage sites associated with Canada’s colonial past, emphasizing accuracy, reconciliation, and inclusivity.

Indigenous Arts and Cultural Hertiage

• Provide dedicated federal funding to support the creation, conservation, and public accessibility of Indigenous art and cultural expressions.

• Protect Indigenous intellectual and artistic property rights by legislating and enforcing meaningful recognition and protections, ensuring Indigenous artists and communities retain full control over their cultural creations and heritage.

• Fund initiatives for Indigenous artists to travel and provide mentorship in Indigenous communities, supporting cultural transmission, artistic development, and youth engagement.

• Provide targeted federal funding to ensure that all museums and cultural institutions across Canada fully comply with UNDRIP and the TRC Calls to Action, facilitating accurate representation and meaningful reconciliation.

• Establish dedicated national funding for reconciliation-focused commemoration projects, supporting initiatives that recognize and honour Indigenous histories and experiences

• Provide stable federal funding dedicated specifically to the preservation, revitalization, and promotion of Indigenous languages across Canada, in alignment with the Indigenous Languages Act.

CBC and Public Broadcasting

• Increase CBC/Radio-Canada funding to match per-capita funding levels of internationally recognized public broadcasters like the BBC, ensuring robust national public broadcasting.

• Provide stable, multi-year core funding to CBC/Radio-Canada, indexed to inflation, guaranteed for minimum periods of seven years through a formal memorandum of understanding to maintain independence and stability.

• Restore CBC local news outlets to historical levels, specifically reestablishing local news bureaus and daily suppertime TV news programming in multiple locations within each province and territory, in both official languages (English and French).

• Fund CBC TV news and information programming to be commercialfree or minimally commercial, implementing a maximum of four minutes of advertising per hour to preserve program integrity and reduce commercial influence.

• Develop a public, community-oriented online service through CBC/ Radio-Canada, offering essential local updates including emergency alerts, fire notifications, and community events, providing an effective alternative to commercial social media platforms.

• Expand CBC Indigenous broadcasting significantly, ensuring culturally relevant, Indigenous-led content is widely accessible and reflects diverse Indigenous experiences and perspectives across Canada.

• Prohibit CBC from airing syndicated foreign entertainment programming (“junk food TV”), such as U.S. commercial game shows, prioritizing quality Canadian cultural content that reflects Canada’s unique identity and creativity.

• Reform CBC/Radio-Canada’s governance structure to ensure appointments to its board are transparent, merit-based, and free from political interference.

Canadian Media and Cultural Sovereignty

• Significantly increase public funding for Canadian-owned media, reducing reliance on foreign media, supporting domestic journalism, and safeguarding media independence.

• Restrict foreign ownership of Canadian media, introducing clear legislative measures to protect cultural sovereignty, promote ownership diversity, and limit exposure to foreign propaganda or misinformation campaigns.

• Create an Independent Commission to study media ownership in Canada, with a clear plan to break up media monopolies, support local journalism, encourage diverse ownership, and ensure Canadians have access to trustworthy, independent news sources.

• Direct all government advertising spending exclusively to Canadianowned publications and platforms, ensuring federal support prioritizes domestic media and journalism.

• Strengthen CRTC regulation of digital streaming platforms (as outlined in Bill C-10), mandating contributions to Canadian content production and cultural programming.

• Increase CRTC bandwidth allocation specifically for independent, nonprofit, and community broadcasters, ensuring these voices are clearly heard within Canada’s media landscape.

• Modernize and maintain Canadian Content (CanCon) regulations, ensuring they effectively sustain domestic creative industries and Canadian storytelling in a rapidly evolving digital environment.

• Increase sustained, reliable long-term funding for the Local Journalism Initiative with a continued focus on Canadian media organizations offering local civic journalism in underserved communities.

Language and Official Bilingualism

• Modernize the Official Languages Act to strengthen protections for French and English minority communities, ensuring robust linguistic rights and services across Canada.

• Guarantee bilingual federal government services in every province and territory, actively supporting French-speaking immigration and integration, and ensuring linguistic equality nationwide.

• Prioritize implementation of a modernized Official Languages Act within the first year of the next Parliament, underscoring federal commitment to linguistic equity and minority-language rights.

• Actively defend and promote the equal status of Canada’s two official languages (English and French), ensuring full linguistic equality and accessibility across all Canadian communities.

• Significantly increase federal funding for French immersion programs and second-language education, providing enhanced opportunities for bilingualism to students throughout Canada.

Heritage Preservation

• Implement a federal income tax credit for restoration expenditures on heritage properties, encouraging private owners to preserve historic buildings and sites, enhancing community heritage and local tourism.

• Establish charitable tax credits for donations of heritage easements, encouraging private contributions to preserve culturally significant properties, landscapes, and heritage sites

To read more on the 2025 Green Party of Canada’s platform, click here.

Bloc Québécois

Party Leader: Yves-François Blanchet
Click here for a list of Bloc Québécois MPs and Candidates

In their 2025 platform, the Bloc Québécois has pledged to:

• Transfer all arts and culture powers to Quebec, and the creation of a Quebec Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTQ), along with all monies related to these powers previously exercised by the federal government

• Table a bill to make it mandatory for the CRTC to consult Quebec or the provinces concerned before issuing any regulations affecting our cultural specificity or that of French-speaking communities elsewhere in Canada

• Oppose the cancellation of the United States of America’s tax on digital services

  • Have funds collected to be entirely redistributed to and managed by the cultural community, and to exempt Canadian companies that are victims of piracy of their intellectual property

• Demand a substantial increase federal funding for culture and demand that Francophone culture receive a 40% share of all federal funding

  • Propose a review of subsidy programs to ensure that funds are better directed to organizations and broadcasters that directly support local artists and culture

• Propose to breathe new life into the performing arts by replacing the GST paid on ticket purchases with a fund dedicated to small and medium-sized local presenters, promoters and festivals that bring life to our downtowns and villages

• Support the modernization of CBC/Radio-Canada, conditional on greater independence between the English- and French-language networks

• Demand that all the public broadcaster's online content, including Tou.TV extra and specialty channels, be free and accessible, and that its regional coverage role be strengthened

• Propose a review of regulations governing traditional media, which face unfair competition from multinationals that do not respect local regulations. 

• Propose that Ottawa fund initiatives promote Quebec culture, such as MUSIQC

• Introduce a bill so that the Canadian government recognizes the existence of Quebec culture and promotes it to digital platforms, so that they give our creators a greater place in their programming

• Work towards copyright reform that takes into account the new challenges of the digital age, including mandatory disclosure of sources consumed by artificial intelligence applications and a revised definition of fair dealing

• Propose a tax reward for films, TV series and advertising on all relevant platforms that use and highlight French-language Quebec songs as a soundtrack rather than songs from elsewhere

• Ensure that companies no longer benefit from tax credits for social media advertising at the expense of traditional media

• Support the renewal of support measures for the print media, including advertising revenue sharing with web giants and newsroom support

  • Demand support for the distribution of local newspapers

• Put an end to the practice of making cultural funding conditional on compliance with an institutional editorial line, as envisaged by the National Film Board

• Propose a general assembly on the future of broadcasting, and more specifically of Quebec production and broadcasting, both here and abroad, in a changing, concentrated media universe at high risk of cultural homogenization. 

• Propose the creation of a think-tank for enhanced cooperation with the member states of La Francophonie to promote and enhance the content of certain existing channels, and to pool resources to create material accessible to all countries of La Francophonie.  Allow artists to spread their income for tax purposes

• Work with Quebec's cultural industry and the Union des artistes to facilitate artists' access to employment insurance, under the status of seasonal workers, by standardizing the deduction of employment insurance contributions from their remuneration

• Propose a modernization of the Museums Act and its outdated funding system

• Demand that federal parks on Quebec territory be transferred to Quebec

• Call for a public and independent commission of inquiry into sports federations, where cases of abuse, discrimination and mistreatment have multiplied, preventing the safe practice of sport

  • Campaign for Quebec national sports teams. 

To read the 2025 Bloc Québécois’s platform, click here.

Elections Canada
Elections Canada is the independent, non-partisan agency responsible for conducting federal elections and referendums. Its mission is to ensure that Canadians can exercise their democratic rights to vote and be a candidate. Click here to register to vote!

BC Coalition of Arts, Culture, and Heritage
The BC Coalition of Arts, Culture, and Heritage represent thousands of arts, culture, and heritage organizations in every region and more than 188 communities in BC. This includes hundreds of cultural businesses, venues, festivals, consultants, and independent practitioners, as well as tens of thousands of professional artists, cultural practitioners, and volunteers throughout BC.

B.C. Arts, Culture, & Heritage Sector Insights Report
The survey and report were led by GVPTA, on behalf of and in collaboration with a coalition of B.C.-based arts, culture, and heritage service organizations that represent thousands of organizations and individuals across BC, in every community and region. This includes hundreds of cultural businesses, venues, festivals, consultants, and independent practitioners, as well as thousands of professional artists, cultural practitioners, and volunteers throughout the province.

Stats Canada Arts and Culture Data Viewer
The Arts and Culture Data Viewer is an interactive data visualization tool. It allows users to easily break down Statistics Canada arts and culture economic data by geographic area, as well as data on participation in cultural activities by the demographic characteristics of participants. Economic data includes data on output, gross domestic product, employment and trade.

Provincial and Territorial Culture Indicators
Developed by Statistics Canada to measure the economic importance of culture, the arts, heritage, and sport to the Canadian economy. Among the key findings: the total gross domestic product (GDP) for culture is an estimates $58 billion in 2022; the total number of culture jobs is 648,825; and in BC, the culture GDP constituted roughly $9.2 billion (17.8%) with 115,286 jobs.

Non-Profit Power Up
United Way BC, Vancity Community Foundation, Vancouver Foundation, Victora Foundation, and Food Banks BC collaborated to create Non-Profit Power Up, a government relations and communications toolkit.

Canadian Arts Coalition
The Canadian Arts Coalition is a collaborative non-partisan advocacy movement of national associations, arts organizations and artists, lead by a volunteer Steering Committee comprised of representatives of national, provincial, regional, territorial arts organizations and/or associations committed to equity in the arts and inclusive of Indigenous, racialized, the deaf and disabled.

338Canada
The 338 Canada project is a statistical model of electoral projections based on opinions, electoral history, and demographic data. The model provides data insight on provincial and federal elections.

Global Public Affairs 2025 Federal Election Toolkit
The toolkit provides some basic rules of engagement, as well as guidance on how to comply with election law. It also outlines typical campaigning conventions – from how to engage with government, to how to develop a positive relationship with a potential future Member of Parliament.

Earnscliffe Strategies - Election Report: The Kickoff
Earnscliffe Strategies has written an article on the context of the 2025 Federal Election and what is at stake. The firm will be publishing weekly election reports on Fridays - subscribe!

Imagine Canada: Federal Party Platform Analysis 2025
Imagine Canada released tables are based on a review of the party platforms available online (sources are linked in the table below). Only commitments that directly reference the nonprofit sector, that would have a meaningful impact on the sector’s operating environment or that are related to Imagine Canada’s policy priorities have been included.

Hills Strategies: Comparison of the GDP of culture and other sectors of the economy
Hills Strategies released an article comparing the GDP of the arts and culture sector to other sectors in the economy.

OCAD Electoral Townhall on Arts and Culture
OCAD hosted a townhall on the arts and culture, focusing on key issues facing the sector today – one that is essential to the country’s sovereignty and economic resilience in the face of global trade and tariff challenges.

Know a great advocacy resource? Email info@allianceforarts.com